Valentine(56)

Aimee reads the Karen Carpenter interview in People and vows to drink at least eight glasses of water a day, and when they are ready to leave the pool, she carries her clothing into a closed stall to change out of her bathing suit. D. A. worries aloud that her father is working too much, that she isn’t cooking good enough dinners for him. Macaroni and cheese isn’t really a balanced meal. Aimee says her mother doesn’t sleep nights, and every time her daddy drives into town they stand in the kitchen and shout about the trial. Last week, one of them broke a lamp.

Daddy wants us back out at the ranch right now, she tells Debra Ann. He says he’s done paying rent and a mortgage. My mother can be a real bitch. Aimee says that last word slowly, D. A. notices, drawing it out and letting it hang in the air between them like the scent of something wonderful, heavily buttered popcorn or a warm chocolate bar.

*

When she asks Jesse where he’s been lately, why he hasn’t felt like having any company, he says he doesn’t know. Maybe it’s the heat, but lately there’s been a persistent hum in his good ear, a little ache that remains even after the bar is closed and the bouncer has turned off the music.

He doesn’t tell her that the noise is there when one of the dancers pulls a few dollars from her roll of tips and says, Thanks, Jesse, you’re a real sweetheart. It’s there when he mops the floors and hauls the garbage to the dumpster, when he collects his pay and says good night to the bartender, also a veteran, who lets Jesse come in before the dancers arrive and use the dressing room shower. And Jesse appreciates that, he really does. But he still wishes the man would ask him to sit down and have a drink with the rest of the crew at the end of a long night.

He doesn’t tell D. A. that the noise follows him home and lies with him on his pallet while he waits for the stray cat to wander in and curl up against his side, that it is still there in the morning when he and the cat wake up and stretch and marvel at the heat, its meanness and persistence. Instead, he says that he figured he could sleep anywhere after being overseas, but his bed feels harder than it did a month ago, and some mornings he wakes up thinking he’ll never get home. Summer is here, and he still hasn’t fished the Clinch River. His sister Nadine hasn’t yelled at him to put on a hat before he dies of sunstroke. There are a thousand miles between here and home. I guess I’m just real tired, he says.

I know what you mean, D. A. says, because she thinks this is what a grown-up would say. I feel the same. She scratches fiercely at a nasty rash on her ankle. When it begins to bleed, Jesse stands up and goes into his hideout for a tissue. She is not allowed to go inside. Jesse has explained that it wouldn’t be proper for her to see his underwear lying on the ground, or his shaving kit scattered across the top of an overturned milk crate. I’ve already seen it, she could tell him if she wanted to. Sometimes when you’re at work, me and the cat come in and take a nap on your pallet.

You ought not to pick at that ringworm, he says. That’s how it spreads. The fungus gets up underneath your fingernails and contaminates everything you touch.

D. A. jerks her hand away from her leg and stares at her fingernails for a few seconds. Tell me one of your stories, she says. Tell me about the time you caught a two-headed catfish. Tell about your sister, Nadine, and how she got baptized twice, just because she thought the first time didn’t take. Tell me about Belden Hollow and trilobites.

But Jesse doesn’t feel up to it, hasn’t felt up to it for a few weeks. Maybe Debra Ann can bring a few more of Mrs. Ledbetter’s homegrown tomatoes next time, maybe some more of them sleeping pills from Mrs. Shepard’s kitchen drawer. Maybe if he could get a decent night’s sleep, he’d feel better.

Maybe, D. A. says, but I think the tomatoes might be all played out for the year. She doesn’t tell her friend that she’s been thinking about giving up stealing since Ginny’s postcard came, since she realized she could be the best girl, she could take care of every stranger who found himself stranded in West Texas, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. Ginny isn’t coming back to Odessa, at least not anytime soon.

They are lying in a shady spot at the bottom of the flood canal, dipping washcloths into a bucket of ice water, wringing them out, and laying them across their faces. If you need to get out to Penwell, she says casually, I could drive you out there.

You’re too little to drive. Jesse laughs. He picks an ice cube out of the bucket and pops it in his mouth to suck on. D. A. sticks her hand in the bucket and feels around for the biggest piece of ice she can find. She throws it as hard as she can, and the ice cube skitters across the pavement and melts almost immediately.

Hold on, Jesse says and ducks into his hideout for a few minutes. When he comes back, he carries a wad of bills—seven hundred dollars. He needs another hundred, and then he can go out to Penwell for his truck.

Can I hold it? she asks him, and when Jesse hands the money over, she hops up and down saying, We’re rich, we’re rich, we’re rich.

He holds out his hand and she reluctantly gives the bills back. I can bring you a rubber band to hold all that together, she says. When are you going back to Tennessee?

There aren’t any jobs there, he says, but when I get my truck I can stay here for a while longer and make a lot of money working on a rig.

What he doesn’t say: If he goes home empty-handed to Nadine and his mama, it will just be the latest fuckup in a lifetime of fuckups.